Beta

by Rachel Cohn

  It feels like we are hanging over the edge of the world.

  I don’t feel the chemical rush of adrenaline, but I can understand its potential by looking at Ivan’s face, registering a combination of anticipation, fear, and determination. We shall dive into danger. Astrid, he’s told me, was scared of heights and would never play this game with him.

  Our feet stand at the edge of the cliff on the Governor’s property. Beneath the rugged edges of the cliff, a hundred yards or so below us—about the length of a football field—Io’s waters spread wide and promising. The servants have fastened each of us into a paraglider, and Ivan and I now stand at the spot from which we will make our running leaps to ascend into the air, away from land.

  Ivan turns around to face the house. “We’re going to take a hard run starting from that spot.” He points to a large rock several feet away from us, then circles his arm to where our feet now stand. “You need to make a very strong leap when you reach the edge here, so that when you take off you don’t hit the rocky cliff side.” He points to a compound of houses near the shoreline, a couple of miles from our cliff perch. “See that megahouse carved into the limestone cliff down there? That’s the Fortesquieu compound. We’re going to take a nice spin over the water, and then land on the beach there, where the sand is firm enough for a running landing. Got it?”

  I nod. He starts to proceed back toward the rock where the wing of his paraglider is spread on the ground to prepare for a forward launch. Once he’s ready to leap from the edge, the wing will alight and expand above him, carrying him over the ocean.

  But I don’t immediately follow him. Instead, I wonder what would happen if I simply said, No.

  Would my term of service expire if I suddenly announced, Ivan, leaping from this cliff could easily throw me to my death. I have never maneuvered a paraglider before. I have a chip telling me how to use it, but no actual experience to serve as a guideline for how to guide this craft through the wind we will encounter hovering unprotected high above the ocean. Also, I would rather go for a swim in the floating pool and have visions of a beautiful bronze surfer god with turquoise eyes. After my swim I would like someone to serve me chocolate. I would like that someone to be human. I would like the clones to be the ones served today. You shall fasten them into their paragliders if that’s how they choose to goof off today. Be a dear, won’t you, pet?

  Ivan calls to me. “Come on already, Elysia.”

  I say the word. Quietly, but out loud. “No.”

  “What did you just say?” he asks, his face displaying shock and confusion.

  “No,” I repeat more loudly.

  Ivan doesn’t know what to make of my response. Should he be furious? Pacify me? Order me?

  “Elysia, I said—”

  I don’t wait for his response, but instead take only a few steps backward, then crouch into runner’s position. “Kidding!” I say. “Sorta!”

  I don’t bother with the mad dash from Ivan’s designated starting point. I use all my strength to press down and then I shoot my legs as high as they’ll take me, and I leap.

  We soar.

  Flying high in the air, held aloft thousands of feet in the air by the simple elegance of strings attached to a billowing flap of wing material, I understand why Ivan would actively seek this danger. Being up here is being: Free. Open. Infinite.

  As the sun sets on the westward horizon, it casts an apricot glow over the violet water. The air feels thinner and more delicate than the premium oxygen pumped into the atmosphere below us. Gulping it in feels risky, enticing.

  Could she be in that human idea called heaven in the skies above me? As I fly over the ocean, my lungs for the first time filling with the non-bioengineered air that she might have known, I can’t help but think, I hope my First got to experience this.

  “Sweet, huh?” Ivan’s voice says into the audio receiver in my helmet.

  “Better than ’raxia?” I respond.

  I hear him laugh. “‘Nothing’s sweeter than ’raxia. But ’raxia is for riding out boring days on Demesne. Flying up here is living for real.”

  The high altitude offers me a new and broader view of the violet ring surrounding Demesne, and beyond the ring, to the white-tipped monster waves known as the gigantes, which look meek and unthreatening from so high above the water. For the first time since I emerged, I see the vastness of the real ocean beyond Io. As I watch it ebb and flow, howl and spit, I have a new understanding of its mighty power; Ivan and I seem so small and inconsequential in comparison to the ocean’s enormousness. Past the gigantes, I see the archipelago of smaller uninhabited islands, their peripheries lined with white sand, but away from the shores, teeming with brush and jungle. I can begin to understand how those lands would be considered feral and lawless.

  I look into the nothingness far beyond the islands. Water stretching into what seems like eternity. A thousand miles away, completely beyond my vision and, probably, my reach—forever—is the place where the Mainland meets the ocean. She must have come from there.

  Does he miss her, the bronzed god whose heart she owned, and who destroyed hers in return?

  “Fortesquieu compound ahead,” Ivan’s voice says into my helmet. “Prepare to land.” I adjust the ropes accordingly. Ivan and I begin a slow descent as we near the landing spot on Demesne’s shoreline.

  Thud. My feet hit the earth, and I run to soften the landing.

  Thud thud thud. Ivan drops behind me, harder and more awkwardly. He tries to run, but the paraglider apparatus wraps around him, forcing him to fall down. He coughs as he stands back up, entangled in rope, but exhilarated. “Awesome ride!” he wheezes.

  “Why do you cough?” I ask him.

  “Happens to people who grow up here. We’re so acclimated to the pure air that when we get up into the other air, and it’s so much thinner, our lungs take a beating on the landing. I should do this more often, to prepare to acclimate on the Base.” He coughs harder and louder.

  A lone figure walking down the beach comes up to him and pats his back from behind. Ivan turns around to greet the person. “Tahir!” Ivan exclaims. Ivan and the lone figure called Tahir do the ’bro fist-and-shoulder-bump thing indigenous to the Whoa! species.

  Tahir is a tall male teen, with mocha-colored skin and hazel eyes framed in thick black lashes, and lips so coral-red and full they seem almost feminine, so perfect, it’s as if they were genetically designed specifically for kissing. His black hair is half cornrowed, with braids framing his face, extending back from his forehead to a few inches into the middle of his head, where the braids end and his natural hair opens into a shag style, loose and free. Like his cousin Farzad, he has an admirably tight set of abdominal muscles on display above his board shorts, but his chest is bare, whereas Farzad’s is specked with black hair.

  Tahir appraises me curiously from head to toe, then steps around to my backside, where he must notice the word BETA laser-tattooed across the back of my neck. He steps back around to face me from the front, staring intently into my fuchsia eyes. My skin experiences a tingling sensation as our eyes meet, which I attribute to friction from the paraglider landing. He looks deeply into my eyes instead of glancing away quickly as the other humans do, as if he wants to see if there’s something behind my glazed eyes besides an empty soul.

  Unwrapping himself from the paraglider, Ivan tells Tahir, “Yeah, they’re making teen Betas now. Can you believe it? She’s called Elysia. Welcome home, buddy.”

  Tahir does not answer Ivan. Instead, his hand reaches out to touch my elbow, which feels a strange and immediate suction of warmth passing from his body to mine. He looks plaintively into my eyes while his full lips curve into a sweet half smile. “Hey, beautiful,” he says to me.

  It’s like he’s a real live Prince Chocolate.

  Delicious.

  IVAN COMMENCES THE RELAY ROUNDS, AND within hours after our paraglider landing on the beach, the gang—Ivan, Farzad, Greer, and Dementia—have assembled in Tahir’s
leisure quarters at the Fortesquieu compound to welcome their friend back to Demesne.

  The Fortesquieu compound is a grand, multistory, pueblo-style structure carved into the limestone cliff towering over Demesne’s most spectacular piece of oceanfront land. Tahir’s quarters are a series of rooms with white stone walls and circular glass windows like a ship’s portholes looking out over the ocean. The rooms are decorated with Turkish rugs and pillows and furnished with intricately carved tables and chairs made from ivory and extinct precious woods. The servants are under orders not to disturb Tahir’s homecoming with his friends unless requested. A tray of finger sandwiches and glasses of fresh mint lemonade have been left for refreshment.

  I feel drawn to him in a way I can neither define nor understand.

  I just want to look at Tahir…forever.

  Tahir tells us about his time back in Biome City, where he went to undergo extensive physical therapy after his accident. His college hopes, his former life on the competitive big-wave surfing circuit—these have been set aside for the time being. For now, his only life is recovery from his injury and near-death experience. His friends sit around him, rapt, as he relates his story, his hazel eyes occasionally peeking at me in my quiet corner, where I sit on a pillow at the window overlooking the sea. There is a remote quality in the way he speaks—slowly, as if he might at any time stumble over his words or memories. His spine and neck are still healing, he explains. Not only can he no longer compete, but there is to be no surfing at all for him for a long while. Maybe ever.

  “No!” cries out Farzad. “It’s too much. Unacceptable.”

  “But remember,” says Greer, quietly. “He lived. The price could have been so much higher.”

  I glance at the mural on the wall behind where Tahir stands. The mural takes up the entire length of the wall and is a masterful painting, better than a hologram. It pictures Tahir in surfer stance, riding a huge wave that towers over his head. The painting is so detailed and close up on his body as to give a larger-than-life vision of the ripples in his biceps and abdominal muscles and the power of his strong legs. He rides deep inside a sapphire-colored tube of water rimmed in bubbling white foam above his head, while his back hand trails in the water behind him. His hazel eyes are brighter in this picture than they are in person, and display an intense determination. The detail in the painting is extraordinary, so precise that a viewer could almost imagine the sound of the swell rising before its inevitable crash, could almost smell the sea air and feel its breeze caressing Tahir’s skin in that moment. To conquer such a wave must be a heroic feat, as evidenced by the many surfing trophies and ribbons displayed in a case on the wall opposite the mural.

  “Let’s play Z-Grav,” says Ivan. “Something like the old times.”

  Tahir shakes his head. “No more Z-Grav for me either.”

  The group lets out a collective gasp.

  “At least for now,” Tahir amends. The friends nod. Things can be the way they were, their faces register.

  But when he looks over at me, somehow I see in Tahir’s eyes a different message: No. Things will never be the same.

  It’s nonsense to think I could experience some physical or psychic pull toward him.

  So why do I feel it anyway?

  In Tahir’s FantaSphere room, the boys play Biome FlightFight, a fighter plane war game fought over the desert landscape of Biome City, leaving the girls free in the adjoining room to be girly—that is, to paint toenails and talk about the boys. Dementia half lies on an L-shaped chaise, her legs draped over the chair’s end as I sit on the floor painting her toes a crimson blood color. Greer sits at the corner of the long side of the chaise with her legs stretched out on the cushion, Dementia’s head pressed against her outer thigh. With one hand, Greer sips a lemonade; with her other hand, she strokes Dementia’s long raven hair as if Dementia were a kitten snuggled up against her.

  “Does Tahir seem colder to you?” Greer asks Dementia.

  “Totally,” says Dementia. “Before, he was, like, arrogant-cold. Now he’s just cold-cold. In his really hot Tahir way, of course.”

  This statement actually makes sense to Greer, who nods knowingly. “For sure. He really broke her heart.”

  “Whose?” I ask. “Did the heart require surgery?”

  “Love heartbreak,” says Greer. “Not an actual heart splitting apart. It just feels that way.”

  “Astrid’s heart,” Dementia says. “She loved Tahir madly. They weren’t a couple, exactly, but they were an item when he was on the island, even if he would never publicly acknowledge that. He had other girls wherever he went, on the surf circuit, a whole harem back in Biome City, probably.”

  Greer says, “I guess you can be like that when your father is one of the richest men in the world. Tahir could have any girl he wants.”

  “Probably has!” says Dementia.

  Greer laughs. “Yeah, probably. Poor Astrid. She was so into him, but he would never restrict himself to a girl whose father is only an employee of this small island.”

  “Would it not be prestigious for Tahir to associate with the daughter of the Governor?” I ask. And what about his daughter’s clone replacement? I think.

  Greer says, “Associate, sure. But, like, a committed relationship with her? Not cool, by Demesne standards. People would say it was beneath Tahir. Astrid’s father is just a hired hand. The Governor and his family live here at the will of the Board of Directors, not because they actually own property here.”

  I ask Greer, “Does your father, the envoy, own his property here?”

  This seems like a logical question but Greer snaps, “No,” and then regards me with irritation. “But at least my family comes from old money, even if we’re not crazy wealthy like this old girl.” She pats Dementia’s head affectionately.

  I don’t understand how senility affects Greer’s family’s wealth, nor how Dementia at seventeen human years could be considered an old girl, but I suppose the answers will become clear to me eventually.

  Dementia says, “Astrid was so sweet but too consumed by her determination to get into the best university. And she was such a yawn when she ranted on about fair distribution of wealth and all those impossible ataraxias. It was embarrassing. I think that’s what finally drove Tahir away. She gave him her heart and he walked all over it.” Dementia pauses while I try to imagine Tahir placing his foot on Astrid’s beating heart. “Elysia, my leg’s totally cramping. Rub my legs or something.” I cease polishing her toes and rub her calves. “That’s better. Go back to polishing now.” Her leg cramp passed, Dementia resumes speculating about Astrid and Tahir’s relationship. “Plus Astrid never wanted to go anywhere that would distract from her studying, and Tahir wanted to go everywhere. He was all, ‘I’m gonna be hovercoptering over the Alps or race-riding across the Himalayas while you sit around here pining for me.’”

  Greer says, “I could never figure out why Astrid was into a scoundrel like Tahir. He was so the opposite of her.”

  “But, gorgeous much?” Dementia sighs. “Let’s have some of that.” She leans over to press PLAY on a holoframe on the side table. The frame’s hologram picturing Tahir at last year’s Governor’s Ball goes into action. The clip shows Tahir wearing a black tuxedo with hazel-colored lapels to match his eyes, twirling Astrid on the dance floor, then dipping her so low her head nearly touches the ground. “I worship the ground your head walks on,” Tahir tells her. Astrid laughs and smiles as he raises her back to him and presses her close. The eyes of all the women surrounding the dancing couple seem fixated on Tahir. He smiles back at them, gleaming pearly white teeth, then returns his attention to Astrid. “Hey, beautiful,” he murmurs to her. Her face lights up anew.

  “Well, yeah,” Greer agrees once the clip ends. “There’s that. He’s gorgeous to the fullest. But Astrid had real feelings for him, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge to his parents that they were more than a casual couple. He totally used her.”

  “Karma,” says Dementia.
“That accident was no accident, if you get my cosmic drift.”

  “Do you think they see each other in Biome City?” Greer asks.

  “Doubt it,” says Dementia. “Tahir’s too much the love-’em-then-leave-’em type.”

  I have completed painting Dementia’s toenails. I ask Greer, “Shall I paint yours too?”

  Greer momentarily ponders the question, then responds, “Not today. I don’t think the Aquine would like it.”

  “The Aquine?” I ask.

  “The assistant who came here from the Base, to work for my dad for a while. I am crushing on him so hard it’s pathetic. He’s an Aquine, so he probably goes for natural girls who don’t wear toe polish. Aquine are supposed to be all humble and into modesty or whatever.”

  Aquine, I query. The interface shows me that the Aquine are a cloistered sect of genetically engineered people who mated to produce a new race of perfect humans. They are known to be peaceful, religious zealots who, along with engineering their DNA for great looks and strength, have created a race of people who are loyal to a fault: they only mate for love, and are monogamous. Once they mate, they are mated to their partner for life. This master race does not believe in tempestuous or casual lovemaking.

  Dementia says, “The Aquine came round my house last week, did I tell you? I almost passed out from his gorgeousness. He was interviewing our staff for the annual report to the Replicant Rights Commission. His voice is this totally sexy growl, but he has a face like an angel. I wish he would interview me!” Dementia’s hand touches the fleur-de-lis scar on her face.

  Greer removes Dementia’s hand and places her own hand on Dementia’s scar, tracing it with her index finger. “My sweetest Dementia,” Greer says, “you make me want to cry. Why do you do things like that to yourself?”

  Dementia points in my direction. “Because I want to be like Elysia. I want to not feel. I want to not hurt.”